The rest of the gulp.

Chapter 1: Of Dangerous Bifocals  Part 2
   Hunger was the only force that could pull Maleya out of her area when she didn't want to. She pressed her thumbprint into the handle of the fridge before opening it. When she did, blue light shone on her favorite foods. Maleya pulled out feta cheese curds. She turned and leaned against the counter. To her right the counter ran in a U shape, curving around in front of her again six feet away. Across this counter from her, tan-ish hair bobbed and twisted, disappearing momentarily sometimes before coming back into view. Maleya smiled and threw a cheese curd at it. The tan-ishness ducked behind the counter and Barley tossed her a thumbs-up before nimbly retrieving the fallen cheese curd.

            "Leya."

            "Mmm."

            "You have writers 'spert stuff in a while."

            "Mm-hmm. S'why I'm eating." Another cheese curd. She savored the spices and the crumbling tangy cheese against the roof of her mouth.

            "Kay. Leya, think I'll ever be an expert?" It was a ridiculous question, which may have been why Barley loved asking it so often.

            "You're not practiced in the art of failing, so my suppositions are that yes, one day you too will be a spert." Half of a face appeared above the counter, cut abruptly off at the bridge of a nose. Tan hair and blue eyes stared at deep brown hair and green eyes.

            "Good." Barley's eyes thanked Maleya seriously. "In what?"

            "What do you love?"

            "Knowing."

            "Barley!"

            The eyes widened. "Why not? Other people have made up new expertesses before."

            "Areas of expertise, Barley."

            "Expertesses. It's a new word."

            "Um...Barley? Words are not invented." Maleya looked serious. Barley rolled his eyes and propped his chin on the counter.

            "D'they really? You're such a parrot, Maleya. You say everything you hear in your writer's class thingy because you're so scared to be different, a cross-over, to be a writer-techy, because people don't like that. So what? What can anyone do to you?"

            "Lot's of things."

            "Leya, seriously."

            "People could take away everything I've been working on. Everything. You don't know what that means."

            "Ok, ok. But whadda you really think about words. Aren't they invented? Do they always gotta come from the right people?"

            Barley, you know too much. You figure out so much more than anyone else would. It's because you always have to know! Maleya didn't voice her exasperation. It was better to just answer Barley's question. "Ok, fine. I don't think words grow. But I don't think they're invented either," she cast a superior glance at Barley, "they are discovered. They wait, hovering on the fringe of consciousness, dancing out of reach of our thoughts when we reach for them, and then slipping in when we need them and forget to look for them. It's perfection."

            "That's why you're a writer," Barley stated. They stared at each other for a few minutes.

            "I want a drink," Maleya intoned, pushing her off the counter. A cupboard opened and the tap started running.

            "That's why you're a techy." Barley stood up all the way and leaned against the counter, watching Maleya drink her water.

            "Barley, you have no idea."

            "But I will." Barley grinned and held a slender black wire, barely visible even in the brightness of the kitchen.

            "Is that a microphone?"

            "Mm-hmm. I've got a bunch. Dad brought 'em home," Barley championed grinning. Maleya sighed. Her father was the only real techy, and it was dangerous for him to be bringing supplies home to his family. It was hard to say exactly why, though. All areas of expertise just kept to themselves, without sharing what they had or what they knew with other areas, unless there was a finished product that would benefit everybody. Maleya's dad had always been bringing things home because his literal area was in the house, where he preferred to work on things. Naturally Maleya and Barley had grown up with more than their share of tech knowledge.

            Knowing some things about tech wasn't so much a problem, because everyone was allowed to have some tech. But not too much. The Hominy's had too much. Even that wasn't such a problem, except that they used it, instead of just knowing. Of course using the knowledge made them more proficient in it, and soon Maleya's dad had begun telling the children not to flaunt their tech knowledge. They obeyed. But Maleya still used it.

            And then had come her idea to use it in conjunction with writing. There she had crossed a line. Nobody knew about it yet, not even Barley, to whom Maleya told everything. It was too dangerous. It was mixing two areas of expertise. It would change the way things were. It would blur lines and confuse both techies and writers. It was a fascinating secret, and Maleya was confident that it was worth the time she spent on it, and worth the difficulty and the isolation of hiding it, but it was getting more difficult.

            "Leya."

            "What?!" Maleya scowled, confused by her thoughts.

            "You really should go. The writers' expert meeting is in a few minutes." Barley only used full words when he was serious.

            "I know." Maleya tried to ignore what she was thinking and went to her room – her area – to gather her manuscript and pert-paper for notes. Confounded technology.

             
{Hey - same rule here as before. Comment. And thank you kindly for reading, friend.}

*GULP*

Eyes closed, fingers crossed, I'm handing it over. 

Taggitenreadit. Pretty pretty please?

I'm posting the first part of a story I'm working on. Before you proceed, you must promise to comment. I don't care if it's only one word - I just want to know what you honestly think. Except still be nice. But comment regardless. I command thee. (I will be sneaky and check my page views and compare them to comments to make sure you all did. Don't think you'll get away with it. -_-  )

Chapter 1: Of Dangerous Bifocals
{Part two of chapter one to follow in a later post.}

Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed.

            "Nope," Maleya muttered darkly. She slid her fingers across the screen and tapped a different tab. Another tap and a keyboard appeared below codes dictating grass texture and strength. With one fingertip, she highlighted a section of code, deleted it, and typed something to replace it. She grabbed a pair of bulky, thick-lensed bifocals and slipped them on over her own tiny glasses. Tapping the screen again, she changed the control from touch to voice.

            "Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed."

            The bifocals – screens in reality – glowed for a moment, then grass appeared in them, waving and bending under a heavy wind. Maleya watched five seconds of footage before the motions began to repeat themselves.

            "Um...." she searched desperately for a word or a sentence that would keep the story going. “The two field mice were...were...unperturbed by um...the fury above them." Images flickered belatedly across the lenses. Two something-or-other’s blobbed together sheltered by the waving grass. Maleya grabbed the microphone and pulled it as far from the touch-screen as the limited cord would allow.

            "The mice scurried!" she exclaimed trying to keep her tones natural. Frustration was taking over. The blobs in the vision of the bifocals shrank and became detailed images of the tiny rodents specified. With deft fingers she took control of the screen again, delicately dragging an iconic marker back to the first word, which had appeared on a digital paper with handwriting coded to her own.

            "And...open book." This time she paused the pantomime before the mice came into the story. Sky: blue. Grass: improvised mixes of green and tan. Soil: barely visible through the thick growth. Slowly Maleya nodded. Tap. Story deleted. Maleya removed the bifocals and slipped them into a soft velvet bag.

            "Now..." Maleya dug a sloppy sheaf of notebook paper out of a drawer in her desk and began to read it aloud to the screen.

            Maleya was a writer. Well, really she was a renegade. But she was supposed to be a writer. Writing was what she did. It was what she knew. It was her passion. Everyone knew Maleya was a writer. Even Maleya did. But that didn't change her mind about anything. It just scared her.

            Barley wasn't an anything yet. He would be, soon enough. Everyone knew that. He'd be an expert in something. He'd be the talk of the town. He'd learn from the best and improve on their methods, until he was the best. But he was still trying to figure out which pert to ex.

            Well, currently he wasn't figuring anything about exes or perts. Barley was rather viciously concerned with knowing. He seemed to always know what was going on with everybody in the family. It was his business, somehow. He'd pop up whenever anybody had an idea, or a new plan, or a change of plan, or a challenge. He was always the first to know. How he knew when to pop up was a mystery. Most likely he had programmed his intuition to sense that sort of thing – that time when someone is bursting with an idea or nervous about an appointment and just aching to tell someone. It wasn't an annoying thing. Barley was the family calendar. It was his quirk. Everyone had one of those too, just like they had an area of expertise. Things just were that way.

            There was really nothing wrong with the way things were. Everyone was an expert at something and their expertise usually became obvious when they were 10 or 11. Everyone had a quirk, and it always lasted at least a year or too after you became an expert (only cropping up occasionally thereafter.) Everyone was beautiful in some way. If you didn't have soulful eyes, you were bound to have beautiful lips. If you didn't have those, well your complexion was probably perfect. More people than not had several of these handy features. Most people only had a limited amount of techy stuff. It was typical. But the Hominy family had a bunch of tech knowledge and equipment. That part wasn't supposed to be that way. Only Maleya really took it too far though. But no one knew, so even though it wasn't supposed to be that way, it was, and it didn't matter.

***

       

Something Beautiful

I think I have an inverted hole in me somewhere. Probably in the region of my heart, seeing as those things are generally located in that area. It's a hole because I have a need - I need to make something beautiful. It's inverted because it's not something I need to receive but something I need to do. Inverted hole.

I tried to do that singing.

I think I'll leave the singing to someone else. It's not that I don't like singing. I love music, and I love choir. But when I perform, I blank out technique (while words - Italian though they be - remain rooted stubbornly in my mind.) I don't think I'm cut out to be a soloist. It's fun when I do it right, but it takes a lot of work. And then I'm focusing on technique, not beautiful.

I want make beautiful. So I have to go somewhere else, try some other voice. I think my fingers speak better than my vocal chords sometimes. Make that all the time. It must be why I've always liked loved writing. When I write, I put something together that's never been put together before. I can choose my words, my tools, and I can sit and play them until they sing to me.

A singing mosaic. That's the goal. Each word a piece of glass?! - and each synonym, however close in color, never quite the same shade. And when you want a subtle, alluring shadow, you have to take the darkly shimmering bit of clearness that is exactly that color. Too dark and it's menacing. Too light and you don't need to explore it because you can see through it from across the courtyard.

Words are like that. Each gathering of letters, syllables and emphases has it's own personality. The more alike one is to the next in the thesaurus, the more vital it is that you know which one you want. Which one will tint that shadow with perfect justice, perfectly despised rightness.

Not for the reader - for me.

I want a mosaic that will stun me. I want to look at the beauty, created by words - chosen, sprinkled, cast out, placed with care. I want something so beautiful, it chains my hands when it looks I look it in the eye.

When my fingers can procreate that beauty, then I will be a writer.

*Deep breath* You choose the title!

...is something I love to do. I had to write a paragraph using setting to insinuate mood. And not just any setting or mood...I had to choose from a list of settings and mood.

Settings: City in the Rain; Midnight on the Farm; 1890, in the Parlor; High Noon on the River; A Spring Morning; In the Bar, After Hours; The Dusty Road; Dawn in a Foreign Place.

Mood: sinister, sick with love, full of promise, suicidal, dangerous, suspense, happy-go-lucky, lonely.

Sooooo...here be the paragraph, and you see if you can determine which I chose from each list! Leave a comment with your guess before I tell you!

Droplets made music in puddles. Singing water filled damp air, thrusting out delight and receiving its delight thrust unceremoniously back, leaving ripples. There was work to do: high rises and business men with newspapers, Hyundai Sonatas honked angrily, afraid of spoiling their polish on the wet city freeway – uncheery, all. Rain’s embodiment, wearing mother-enforced galoshes and brown ringlets, mad the weary water smile by leaving vanishing footprints on the drowned sidewalks and kissing the raindrops with green eyes wide in wonder. Rain fell, surer of its task of joy, and bathed the world in sweet dancing sorrow.

D2

If you have changed a life, can your life stay the same?

I have to wonder how I've changed. I didn't see it happen. But I think it must have, somewhere.

I don't know when I first learned about disciple making. It probably happened to me before I really knew what it was. Mom lead a Bible study for me and my sisters. We attended. That was that. Then Dad led a Bible Study every Wednesday night for men at the church. Then both my parents told me I should lead one. I gulped. And I turned them down.

Two years later, I must have had a better idea of what Discipleship was. "Mom!? I think I could lead this Bible Study. Do you think so? Can we order the training kit?"

And two years after that, I actually got to learn about disciple making.

Left to Right - Me, Mariah, Tiffany. Tuesday Ladies, we call each other.  Should be more like girls, maybe. We're not old. We studied Discipleship as we practiced it. Mariah and I were discipled by Tiffany as we learned about discipleship. The three of us studied it. We learned that disciple making is a three-tiered work of faith. First we are discipled. We study scripture and strengthen our faith. It's easiest really. It's like going to school. True, you have to work for those moments of revelation, and there's homework, but at least you aren't the teacher.

And then suddenly, you are the teacher. D2. You're a disciple who makes disciples. Just like a graduate student who tutors, you realize the reason for homework. You've needed it all along. And the opportunity to teach usually comes just before you actually think you're ready for it. It must be healthy for us.

Last week marked D2 for me. I have been friends with Little Leah - as my mental faculties consistently label her - for over a year. I can't get her off my heart. I didn't think I loved her any more than any of the other little girls, but God pointed her out to me. When God points something out, you don't have much choice about whether you're gonna do it.

I met with her Wednesday. Tuesday, at 11 p.m. I wrote down a few questions for Leah. "Can you tell me what the Gospel means for you? What do you want to learn about and study in our times together? What do you think 1 Timothy 4:12 means?" I figured I had a pretty good grasp on an hours' worth of material, counting a few awkward pauses and some meditative time.

God: *Snort* Yeah, ok Gianna, if that's what tosses your confetti.

I did get to use one of my questions. "So Leah? Can you tell me exactly what the Gospel means in your own words?"

"Um...I don't think so. No, I'm not sure."

...

*Crickets*

...

"Well, ..." And I began with Romans 3:23. When I finished explaining the gospel, Leah just looked at me. I asked her if she wanted to accept Christ.

"Yes! I do!" So I prayed with her.

I don't think I really caught my breath until that evening. Wait, what?! I think I just...lead somebody to Christ! I couldn't believe what I'd done. I thought back and tried to realize it. Yes, she'd sat there and nodded her head. I'd prayed with her, holding her hands, listening to her talking to her new Savior.

I guess that's what listening feels like. God whispered, and I acted. I can't recall actually thinking about what I was doing. Chances are God was doing the thinking for me.

I want it to stay that way.